Amber Whichard, 3, walks next to a line of people waiting to recieve supplies donated to the victims of Superstorm Sandy at the Red Hook Houses in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, New York, Monday, Nov. 12, 2012. Some of the buildings in the complex are still without power and heat from Superstorm Sandy two weeks ago. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

In Coney Island, a 67-year-old man sleeps with plastic bottles from the bodega, filled with hot water, tucked in his armpits. Toilets unflushed by modern means for a fortnight have created a stench in the Rockaways that is so bad that one man keeps incense lit in his apartment day and night.

On Staten Island, people sit in “warming buses,” cozy and, like time itself these days, going nowhere. In a town in New Jersey where wells don’t pump because the power is out, residents collect rainwater in empty jars. In Long Beach, Long Island, a couple of bicycles through the autumn chill to the charging station at City Hall to keep their cellphones powered.

Two weeks. Monday, Nov. 12, marked 14 days since superstorm Sandy upended lives on the Eastern Seaboard, the longest two weeks of many people’s lives. Plastic bottles. Warming buses. Charging stations. These are just a few of the signposts in a changed world. Help is coming, the people are told, but some have lost the desire to trust.

“I don’t believe,” said Lioudmila Korableva, 71, a resident of a darkened Coney Island building project filled with seniors.

“In the wall goes water,” she said, describing the humid conditions with her Russian accent. There’s just too much moisture in the air. “The blanket is wet.”

Power companies in New York and New Jersey worked Monday to free these remaining communities from the stubborn blackout.

There was progress, with housing projects in Coney Island and the Rockaways flickering to life Saturday and Sunday. There was light, if not heat. Families that had warmed their apartments with stovetop burners could now use the electric oven, with its door wide open. A woman used the burner for its intended purpose Monday morning, handing her granddaughter a pancake on a paper plate.

New Jersey announced an end to gas rationing. Long Island Rail Road service returned to nearly pre-storm timetables. Progress was everywhere, it seemed, but for the man getting his news from a radio with batteries, not here.

“I talk to God,” said Mark Kremer, the Coney Island man whose bedtime routine includes the hot water bottles. “What I did, to suffer like this?” A former home health attendant, he climbs from his second-floor apartment up the pitch-black stairs to the 12th floor to check on his friend Asya Kaplan, 82, who fell in the hall a few days ago and opened up a gash at her hairline.

In the Ocean Village Apartments at the Shore in the Rockaways, there now exists a dividing line at the 10th floor. Below, there is running water. Above, none. A resident on the 14th floor, Lola Idowu, straps on her miner’s helmet with its flashlight and treks down to 10 for buckets of water, four times a day. The older residents have stopped flushing their toilets, neighbors said, and they gather in the lobby, bringing their apartments’ odors with them.

In Seaside Heights, N.J., after two weeks, a first: Residents were allowed to visit stricken parts of the town for a few hours Monday morning.

Wayne Cimorelli, an owner of Coin Castle Amusements and two restaurants in a three-story building on the boardwalk, said his expectations had been raised when he saw a picture of the area before he returned. Then he entered his 21,000-square-foot basement and found 6 feet of sand and debris. Equipment was ruined. A $14,000 ice machine lay on its side.

“This is the nightmare that doesn’t want to end,” he said. “The longer we wait, the more disgusting it gets,” he said. “I would imagine we are up against maggots and whatnot.”

A mile or two away, on Burrell Road, John and Tracy Rosendahl arranged to leave their powerless home to stay at yet another motel room.

One of their young sons was urinating against the house Monday afternoon, as he had been instructed to do in the absence of a working toilet.

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